2. The welfare divide in Latin America: origins and evolutions

Welfare state trajectories in Latin America differ in many ways from those of the advanced economies of Western Europe and North America (Segura-Ubiergo, Reference Segura-Ubiergo2007). The history of welfare state development in Latin America is generally viewed as a top-down process, as stated by Filgueira it is rather a “…history of elite accommodation, elite’s state building and elite’s attempts to co-opt and control non-elite sectors than a history of popular achievements and shaping from below” (Reference Filgueira2005: 4). Social policies in the 1960s and 1970s targeted strategic groups (military, civil servants) with new social security schemes progressively developed to incorporate the urban working and middle classes. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay were the pioneers in this period. The dominant pattern of welfare state construction followed a Bismarckian model, i.e. protection based on employment status (Huber and Stephens, Reference Huber and Stephens2012a). Social policies were financed prevalently through high payroll contributions made possible by high tariff protections enjoyed by the manufacturing sector (also known as Import Substitution Industrialization). These welfare systems catered to a minority of the population and did not offer protection to those outside the formal labour market (Gough et al., Reference Gough, Wood, Barrientos, Bevan, Davis and Room2004). These systems were also inherently gender biased since women were over-represented in the informal economy and enjoyed fewer social rights including pension entitlements (Arza, Reference Arza2019). In many ways, this model represented an exclusionary version of European corporatism because of the absence of a social assistance pillar and deep insider-outsider divides between protected and unprotected sectors in societies.

The thrust towards the progressive incorporation of increasing shares of the population came to an end during the so-called lost decade of the 1980s. Despite a clear trend in the region toward more competitive and representative political systems, deep economic crises and the need to obtain external financial aid undermined governments’ ability to expand social protection. The widespread debt crisis provided institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank with leverage to impose structural adjustment policies inspired by the neoliberal doctrine (the “Washington consensus”). In the area of social policies, recommendations emphasized the privatization of social security, increasing reliance on market providers and the targeting of public resources only to the neediest groups (Barrientos et al., Reference Barrientos, Gideon and Molyneux2008; Huber and Stephens, Reference Huber and Stephens2012a). Social protection was further weakened by labour market and trade reforms that produced loss of industrial jobs, effectively reducing both the coverage and the funding sources of social security systems in the region. Pension programs were among the most deeply affected by the new measures. The Chilean pension reform of 1981 paved the way to the full or partial privatization of pension systems in almost all countries with developed social security systems in the region (Brooks, Reference Brooks2009; Mesa-Lago, Reference Mesa-Lago2008). The implementation of mandatory private accounts strengthened the link between individual benefits and past contributions (Calvo et al., Reference Calvo, Bertranou and Bertranou2010; Hujo and Rulli, Reference Hujo and Rulli2014). These new pension systems did not perform well both in terms of coverage and benefit adequacy, and their legacy is still present today (Arza, Reference Arza2019).

Since the early 2000s Latin America is considered to have taken a decisive inclusive turn (Martínez-Franzoni and Sánchez-Ancochea, Reference Martínez-Franzoni and Sánchez-Ancochea2016; Garay, Reference Garay2016; Pribble, Reference Pribble2013). The magnitude of social policy change has been striking. The most significant innovation has been expansion of coverage to previously excluded groups such as workers in the informal sector and people with insufficient histories of contributions to social insurance. Although Latin America remains the most unequal region in the world, the Gini index fell on average 5 percent during this period and the share of people living in poverty declined from 45.9 to 30.7 (ECLAC, 2018). Reforms swept across all major policy sectors (Barrientos et al., Reference Barrientos, Gideon and Molyneux2008; Lloyd-Sherlock, Reference Lloyd-Sherlock2008). In this context, pensions systems became the object of intensive activity aimed at expanding their coverage (Rofman et al., Reference Rofman, Apella and Vezza2013). While Argentina backtracked on previous reforms making its pension system public again (Hujo and Rulli, Reference Hujo and Rulli2014; Arza, Reference Arza2019), several countries introduced a supplementary non-contributory public scheme for people without any social security or state-financed pension (Garay, Reference Garay2016). In Bolivia, former President Evo Morales replaced the universal pension already in place with a new scheme (Renta Dignidad) with a lower eligibility age (60 instead of 65) and without the cohort restrictions of the Bono Solidario that preceded it (Arza, Reference Arza2019). The former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet introduced a Basic Solidarity Pension in 2008 that guaranteed a minimum pension to older adults not entitled to contributory benefits conditional on residence, age and socio-economic criteria. The same reform also introduced a Solidarity Pension Contribution, a non-contributory supplement for older adults with some pension savings but low benefits (Arza, Reference Arza2019) Many other countries also introduced new social pension programmes in this period (Table 1).

Table 1.

Social (non-contributory), pensions programmes, Latin American Countries, reforms 1919-2011

Source: ECLAC (2019a)

3. Explaining the inclusive turn in social pension in 2000s

The inclusive turn in Latin American social policy generated a rich literature trying to explain why some countries were more successful than others in expanding social protection. The theoretical frameworks generally used stress the importance of a combination of contextual and political factors.

Contextual factors include the rise in commodity prices providing governments with the necessary resources to finance the reforms (Levitsky and Roberts, Reference Levitsky and Roberts2011). Several authors also found that states with longer history of democratic development invested more in social policy. Democracy brought to the fore electoral pressure, thus making political leaders more sensitive to the needs and demands of low-income groups (Huber and Stephens, Reference Huber and Stephens2012a; Segura-Ubiergo, Reference Segura-Ubiergo2007). A third set of factors concerns existing policy legacies (Martínez-Franzoni and Sánchez-Ancochea, Reference Martínez-Franzoni and Sánchez-Ancochea2016; Pribble, Reference Pribble2013). Governments in countries with larger welfare states and contributory pension systems with nearly universal coverage were less pressured to implement social pensions. Specific policy legacies in social pensions also influenced policymakers, although the direction of this effect is not clear cut. The presence of programmes already in place signals a pre-existing technical capacity and willingness of government to legislate in this area, but may also render further reforms unnecessary, especially in the context of already well-developed pension programmes. Overall, these factors – economic prosperity, democratic rule and favourable social policy legacies – were preconditions of expansive reforms, but do not alone explain why certain governments decided to implement such measures, while others facing similar contexts did not (Garay, Reference Garay2016; Pribble, Reference Pribble2013)

To understand the different reform patterns, we need to incorporate political actors. Given that the inclusive turn took place during a period of rise of left-wing governments in Latin America (the so-called pink tide), several authors have emphasized the importance of the political ideology of governments. Part of the literature posited that the strength of the Left was a key determinant of reforms (Huber and Stephens, Reference Huber and Stephens2012a; Levitsky and Roberts, Reference Levitsky and Roberts2011); yet, a number of studies showed that in several cases significant policy innovations benefitting outsiders were introduced also by right-of-centre parties: for instance, in Chile, Mexico and Colombia (Altman and Castiglioni, Reference Altman and Castiglioni2020; Fairfield and Garay, Reference Fairfield and Garay2017; Niedzwiecki and Pribble, Reference Niedzwiecki and Pribble2017). This does not imply that partisanship did not matter for reform trajectories, but rather that its effect was more nuanced than sometimes assumed.

The extent to which parties across the ideological spectrum were willing to undertake reforms depends on further conditions. Electoral competition has been widely acknowledged as a factor driving social policy expansion in the period (Altman and Castiglioni, Reference Altman and Castiglioni2020; Ewig, Reference Ewig2016; Fairfield and Garay, Reference Fairfield and Garay2017; Garay, Reference Garay2016; Pribble, Reference Pribble2013). Where competition was high, incumbents had strong incentives to appeal to broad sectors in society and social policy expansion was deemed as a critical tool to that end. In such context, both left- and right-wing parties were more prone to expand social pensions in order to broaden their electoral support.

The effect of social mobilization on policy expansion has received less systematic attention despite several case studies showing that social movements played a role in the introduction of measures for outsiders (Anria and Niedzwiecki, Reference Anria and Niedzwiecki2016; Garay, Reference Garay2007, Reference Garay2016; Niedzwiecki, Reference Niedzwiecki2014), and that the strength of civil society has implications for social policy change in Latin America (Altman and Castiglioni, Reference Altman and Castiglioni2020). In the next section, we focus on these aspects.

4. The effects of protest on social policy reform

Countries exhibit different institutionalized models of political behaviours and voting is only one of the means that citizens use to express their preferences (Fourcade and Schofer, Reference Fourcade and Schofer2016). The last three decades have seen a resurgence of protest in the region (Roberts, Reference Roberts2016; Silva, Reference Silva2015). These protests were a reaction not only to the high levels of inequality but also to a political situation in which institutions were perceived to be closed to the demands of particular groups of citizens. Compared to electoral politics, the protest arena is open to actors who lack regular access to institutional channels, and thus enhances political participation among traditionally excluded constituencies (Kriesi et al., Reference Kriesi, Grande and Dolezal2012). In the absence of readily available institutionalized channels to voice their discontent, these groups are likely to resort to protests to make demands for more egalitarian social policies and obtain concessions from political elites.

Elaborating on the insights provided by the scholarship on social movements outcomes (Amenta et al., Reference Amenta, Caren and Chiarello2010; Giugni, Reference Giugni2004; Piven and Cloward, Reference Piven and Cloward1979), we distinguish different types of effects of protest on policy-making based on their timing (short- vs. long-term) and the underlying causal mechanism (direct vs. mediated).

Direct effects are by definition short-term and refer to immediate responses of authorities such as a change in the political agenda of parties, the adoption of new measures by governments or the involvement of movements’ representatives in the policy process. However, direct effects are rare as protesters generally lack the power to force authorities to concede to their demands. The effects of protest are generally mediated, i.e. contingent on other characteristics such as the ability of protesters to sway public opinion in their favour and mount an electoral threat to incumbents, or forge alliances with institutional actors such as political parties and trade unions (Giugni, Reference Giugni2004; Ciccia and Guzman-Concha, Reference Ciccia and Guzman-Concha2018). An example of this type of effect is the decisive role played by the alliance between Left parties and popular movements in the adoption of the Renta Dignidad in Bolivia (Anria and Niedzwiecki, Reference Anria and Niedzwiecki2016).

While protest can sometimes produce short-term impacts, many effects of protest on policymaking take time to materialize. Some of the reasons why this occurs relate to the time of the policy process: it often requires several years for an issue to move to the government’s agenda and be legislated. Thus, there is always a certain lag between protest events and policy outputs. By long-term effects, we refer to impacts that occur long after the initial mobilization took place. Large scale episodes of unrest such as the Chilean student protests of 2011, the Piquetero movement in Argentina, or the Bolivian water wars significantly altered trajectories of social policy reform in these countries (Anria, Reference Anria2018; Garay, Reference Garay2007; Roberts, Reference Roberts2016). Some of these effects occurred because governments became more sensitized to the demands of certain sectors in society or feared the resurgence of mobilization (latent threat) (Yoruk et al., Reference Yoruk, Oker and Sarlak2019). Oftentimes, members of protest movements became actively involved in political parties, and sometimes protest movements established their own organizations to compete in the electoral arena. The latter was the case of the MAS in Bolivia. Other effects concern cultural changes produced as results of protesters entering into public opinion battles to gain visibility and legitimacy for their issues. Thus, long-term effects can also be mediated and include spill-overs whereby protests initially targeting specific policies produce changes in other sectors and larger impacts on the whole system of social protection. Fairfield and Garay (Reference Fairfield and Garay2017) offer an example of such effects when they recount how student mobilization in Chile in 2011 did not only push the government to initiate substantial education reform but also placed additional social policy and tax reforms on the government’s agenda.

In sum, the effect of protest on policy-making is often not linear and immediate, but rather diffused and contingent on the characteristics of contexts in which governments operate and the ways in which contentious and electoral politics interact and shape each other. In this article, we take a long-term perspective to comparatively examine the cumulative effect of protest over time. We contend that in societies where contention plays a larger role, the whole field of politics is itself structured differently with consequences on the dynamics of social policy reform.

5. Data and Method

We employ a two-step fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) (Schneider and Wagemann, 2006) to investigate the long-term influence of protests on reforms extending the coverage of social pensions between 2000 and 2011 in 18 Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a set-theoretic method which aims to detect complex causal relations between combinations of conditions and an outcome. These relationships are interpreted in terms of necessity (the outcome is always present when the condition is also present) and sufficiency (the condition is always present when the outcome is also present; Ragin, Reference Ragin2000). A QCA usually yields a number of solutions (or combinations of conditions) leading to the outcome. Indeed, an important advantage of this method is its emphasis on equifinality, i.e. the existence of multiple causal pathways to a given outcome. Consistency is a measure of goodness of fit or degree of validity of each configuration, and is measured as the proportion of cases showing particular combination of conditions which presents also the outcome. A consistency of 1 corresponds to the perfect intersection between conditions and outcome sets.

The two-step procedure adopted here was developed by Schneider and Wagemann (Reference Schneider and Wagemann2006) to deal with the problems of limited diversity, and is based on the distinction between remote and proximate conditions which are progressively entered in the analysis. In the first step, we consider conditions such as the level of economic growth, social expenditure, the share of the labour force affiliated to contributory pension schemes, pre-existing legacies of social pensions, and the history of democratic development (see table 2). Our assumption is that the way these conditions combine in particular settings describes different contexts of need and opportunity for reforms. For instance, a low coverage rate of contributory schemes and the lack of previous legislation on social pensions create greater need for incisive reforms, while sustained economic growth generates revenues which governments can then decide to ‘invest’ in expanding social pensions. In the second step, we incorporate proximate political conditions: the cumulative frequency of protests, the share of left-wing seats in parliament, union density, and political competition. By combining these two levels of analysis, this study aims to examine the ways in which the nexus between protest, parties and social policy is sensitive to the characteristics of contexts.

Table 2.

Conditions, definitions and calibration

We began the analysis by transforming the raw data into fuzzy scores (calibration). Fuzzy scores vary between 0 and 1 and represent degrees of membership of cases in each condition and outcome sets (Ragin, Reference Ragin2000). The calibration entails the choice of three thresholds: full membership (0.95), full exclusion (0.05) and the crossover point (0.50) (Ragin, Reference Ragin2000). We used a mix of empirical, case and conceptual knowledge to identify thresholds (Schneider and Wagemann, Reference Schneider and Wagemann2012). For four conditions (social expenditure, GDP growth, protest, electoral competition), we use the minimum, maximum and average values of the distribution. This implies that they should be interpreted in relative terms: e.g. if a country scores above 0.50 in social expenditure, it means that it is relatively more generous than other countries. For union density, we considered that trade unionism is generally weak in the region with a few exceptions represented by Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Uruguay (Huber and Stephens, Reference Huber and Stephens2012a). In this case, the average is a biased threshold and so we resort to case knowledge to set the crossover point at a value (17) slightly inferior to that of those countries. For coverage of contributory pensions, legacy of social pensions and democracy, we use substantive criteria reflecting the presence and absence of the underlying phenomena. Table 2 details information about measures and calibration for all conditionsFootnote ¹ . In what follows, we illustrate the approach used to measure the outcome and protest variables.

Measuring the expansion of social pension coverage

To measure the expansion of social pensions, we constructed an index which considered the extent to which new programmes effectively addressed poverty at the beginning of the period. Given our focus on the decade of the 2000s, we considered only programmes introduced in this period (table 1) and constructed an index of expansion of coverage of social pension using data from ECLAC (2019a). This index measured social pension expansion as the ratio between the coverage achieved in 2011 and the percentage of population over 65 years old living in poverty in 2000 (ECLAC, 2019b). For instance, the Basic Solidarity Pension in Chile achieved a coverage of 17 per cent in 2011 which corresponded to 64 per cent of the older-age population living in poverty in 2000.

The thresholds used to calibrate this variable are 100 (fully in), 30 (crossover) and 1 (fully out) per cent. In the period investigated, 11 of the 18 countries analysed introduced a new social pension scheme, but only in seven the coverage was above the 30 per cent threshold (figure 1). The choice of this threshold reflects the consideration that programmes that did not reach at least a substantial proportion of the poor cannot be considered veritable cases of expansion. For instance, this was the case of Peru and El Salvador where coverage remained at less than 1 per cent of poverty rates. Conversely, values above 100 like the one in Bolivia (154) indicate that social pensions do not only cater to the poor but also reach other segments of the older-age population. Ecuador, Chile and Venezuela also perform well and have coverage rates between 60-75 per cent. Of the seven countries that did not undertake a reform, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica and Uruguay already had social pension schemes and extensive contributory pension systems in place (see also table 1). In Brazil, the rural pension scheme (Previdencia Rural) underwent a major expansion and improvement of replacement rates already in the 1990s in the wake of the implementation of the 1988 Constitution (Lloyd-Sherlock, Reference Lloyd-Sherlock2008). Although Argentina did not reform its social pension scheme in this period, it changed its contributory system. The system was transformed back to a public pay-as-you-go system in 2008 and a moratorium further allowed people with insufficient histories of contribution to receive a pension. This measure produced a massive increase in coverage rates, especially among women. Nonetheless, this reform did not establish a universal pillar of basic provisions (Arza, Reference Arza2019).

FIGURE 1.

Index of expansion of social pension coverage, 2000-2011*

*This index measures the ratio between the coverage achieved in 2011 and the poverty rate of the population over 65 years old in 2000.

Measuring protest

We use information provided by the Mass Mobilization (MM) project to measure the magnitude of protest in the region. This data was collected by searching Lexis-Nexis for terms such as “protest”, “demonstration”, “riot” and “mass mobilization” in four quality newspapers. A minimum threshold of 50 participants was used to report events (for more details see, Clark and Regan, Reference Clark and Regan2019). We selected protests that took place between 1990 and 2010, and where demands concerned socio-economic and political issues. The cumulative frequency over a 21-year period describes differences in the extent to which protests were a more (or less) regular feature of political expression across countries. By proceeding in this manner, we are thus not assessing the direct relationship between specific protests and government responses (or lack thereof), but rather the relationship between certain configurations of the polity and the medium and long-term propensity of governments to expand social pensions schemes.

As shown in figure 2, the frequency of protests varies from a minimum of 35 in Costa Rica to a maximum of 237 events in Venezuela. Other countries exhibiting high level of contention are Ecuador, Peru and Chile, while the lowest levels of contention are found in Costa Rica, Panama and Dominican Republic.

FIGURE 2.

Cumulative frequency of protest events, 1990-2010